Song of the Week Week, Part Three

[Song of the Week is a "weekly" feature which is supposed to update every Thursday Friday, but almost never does. In it, Drew records a song, or attempts to record a song, or gives up and writes another movie review.]

So what I'm thinking is, I'm about 7 or eight weeks behind on SotW. And I need an impetus (if that means what I think it means) to do a post every day again, which various factors have been keeping me from doing. So hey, I thinks, I'll just do a Song a day for a week and kill two birds with one incredibly time-consuming stone. I have no idea if I'll actually follow through, but here's part three (of seven, obviously).

"Sleep Now In the Fire (Acoustic)":


OK, so we all know that thing where a musician (it's usually singer-songwritery types, not bands), will do a cover of a hard rock or rap song, and they'll slow it down, change the melody, strip it down to just piano or grandpas guitarses? You know, how sometimes it's* a joke, sometimes it's dead serious, and sometimes it's impossible to tell, but no matter what, it's a huge cliche** (is the accent on the "e" or the "i"?)?

I wanted in on that action.

You can definitely file this one in with the "joke" ones (if nothing else, for my impression of Tom Morello's ending solo). The weird thing was originally this was going to be on piano but I quickly re-learned how bad I am at piano (good enough to waste an hour trying, but not good enough to make anything tolerable). This guitar version, by contrast, took all of one take, which if you've listened to i talready, should not at all surprise you (at one point you can actually hear me stop and scroll down so I could read the rest of the lyrics. At others, especially the first verse, you can tell where I was trying to figure out how to fit the lyrics to the melody).

I wanted to do this as a twofer with "Testify," but I would have had to retune my guitar and couldn't find my tuner. If you want to hear my acoustic cover of "Testify," please send me money so I can buy a new one and also buy candy gas.

One thing that turned out surprisingly well is that this song is oddly Dylanesque, mostly because my singing is so bad***. If you actually can sing and want to cover my cover, please, please do. Here are the chords, you probably already know most of them:

----E: D-ish: & A****
C |-0-|----|----2-|
G#|-2-|-0--|----3-|
D |-2-|-0--|----2-|
A |-2-|-0--|----0-|
E |-0-|-0--|------|
B |---|----|------|
and the chorus part is B|-55-3-5-3-5-| and then it's E|-55-3-3-5-5-|, and some variations on that (pretty much the original song's bassline, transposed to guitar. For that matter, the chords are from the original, but pushed down a few keys). For the solo-ey parts, just make up something as you go along, which is what I did.

*Damn you, Coulton!
**Except when I do it, of course.
***How do you make it so the breathing isn't as loud?
****The first two show up throughout the song, but the third is only near the end of the chorus. Also, let's try and make the D-ish chord (or the G-ish, for those of you using standard tuning) sweep the nation.

Click here to see Part One
Click here to see Part Two